Intellectual property can be considered in terms of either its “embodiments” or its “representations.” Generally, an embodiment of an intellectual property is the property itself, while a representation of the intellectual property can be data or meta-data either describing or pointing to the property.
For example, intellectual properties such as real-time human communications, stored and forwarded messages, documents or collections, dynamic or persistent data structures and databases, interpretable scripts, source code, and partially or fully compiled programs and applications, as well as other intellectual properties generally referred to as “content,” are often described as an embodiment of the intellectual property. Embodiments of intellectual property can also be theoretical or abstract concepts which are exemplified, documented or reified as a specific form of content.
Legal rights, contracts, agreements or other assertions can be embodied in the form of content, but are not the embodiment of the intellectual property itself. Instead, these are considered representations of the intellectual property. Some intellectual properties, such as a deed or title to a home, can be representations of physical or real properties.
Intellectual properties are becoming more and more central to the world economy. In an information economy, discrete or aggregate values are placed on intellectual properties, and the markets for general or specific applications of these properties are huge. For example, the software industry, which has embodiments of intellectual properties in software products and services, and representations of property rights in licenses, legal contracts and agreements, copyrights, trademarks and patents, currently has annual sales rates of over $135 billion per year.
Increasingly, the Internet (or World Wide Web) is the medium of transmission of intellectual properties such as software products and the like. The Internet uses the Internet Protocol (IP) to frame, route, and reassemble digital messages. The transaction of intellectual property is a general transfer of data and data communications over the Internet; intellectual property such as software is simply treated as a bit stream in Internet Protocol. On top of the Internet Protocol are specialized transport layer services, such as HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) or SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). Within these, many messages are encoded in markup languages such as XML (Extensible Markup Language), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) meta-markup language based on SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).
Uniform Resource Locations (URLs) are one of the central features of the World Wide Web (WWW). URLs commonly use “http://www” as their preamble, although other types of URLs exist, such as “mailto:”. A URL identifies a unique WWW addressable location of an instantiation of a resource. Multiple URLs can resolve to the same resource, and there are also methods to resolve the same URL to multiple instantiations of the resource, through load balancing and redirection techniques. To date, although there is a general lack of standards and existing standards are overly broad in scope, URLs are generally well-used. There are some standards in the process of being developed; however, these standards are focused on methods for controlling content rather than for asserting legal control. Instead, URLs are primarily used only to locate the computer system and network data necessary to manipulate intellectual property from the computer's point of view. URLs today do not specifically identify intellectual property as intellectual property.
Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) provide a generalized method to create short schematic and semiotic representations that can be used to reference, identify or invoke computerized resources (intellectual properties) over the Internet. The URI schema is a valuable general purpose tool, but does not necessarily specify what kind of intellectual property is identified by the URI. In many cases, the specification of the kind of intellectual property is done solely as the kind of IP traffic the property will travel over, such as via HTTP, SMTP (mailto), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol), telnet, or gopher. Though this information is useful with regard to the technical infrastructure, little or no information is available to the user with regard to the intellectual value of the intellectual property.
Accordingly, what is needed is a method and/or system that can be used to create and manage uniform resource identifiers that can be applied to all instantiations of an intellectual property, for the purposes of asserting legal rights and controls for the intellectual property and for granting those rights to a purchaser or licensee. What is also needed is a method and/or system that satisfies the above need and can be used to assign uniform resource identifiers to the characteristics to the intellectual property, to provide information to a user regarding the intellectual value of the property.
These and other objects and advantages of the present invention will become obvious to those of ordinary skill in the art after having read the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments which are illustrated in the various drawing figures.